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The body has about two hours of carbohydrate fuel (glycogen) at marathon pace (defined loosely as 85 percent of your max heart rate). Beyond that is the dreaded bonk. To simplify the complex science on bonking: body go boom. – Trail runner magazine, David Roche

Interesting article about fasted training. In the past I would always take food with me whenever I went out for over an hour but in recent weeks I’ve been doing these runs fasted and they’ve ended up just fine.

From the outside, it looks like an enormous grey warehouse. Inside, there is a hint of the movie Bladerunner: long cavernous corridors, spinning computer servers with flashing blue lights and the hum of giant fans. There is also a long perimeter fence. Is its job to thwart corporate spies? No – it keeps out the moose.

Welcome to the Node Pole, a hi-tech hub in Luleå, northern Sweden, and the site of Facebook’s first datacentre outside the US. The warehouse opened in 2013 and is set amid a green pine forest, lakes and an archipelago. The Arctic Circle is just down the road. A second centre next door is due to be completed later this year.

The world’s best marathon runners are just 177 seconds from breaking the two-hour barrier: what will it take to get there (apart from drugs)?

Nobody finds the marathon easy – even professionals, especially professionals. The distance is democratic. It has become an event against which hordes of people – fat people, thin people, people crooked by time and people sprightly as foals, rich people and people in need – test themselves. There are now more than 500 marathons all over the world, and more competitors than at any time in the history of the sport.

As the 75th anniversary of the blitz – Germany’s sustained bombing campaign of the UK in the second world war – approaches, these beautiful and striking pictures show the famous bombsites, the tin helmets, the victory rolls and the carry-on spirit

Every generation seems to grow up with the memory of at least one major war in his or her lifetime. Whether we choose to read the headlines or acknowledge the reality beyond our own everyday lives, the war that is currently underway in Iraq and Syria is one that affects us all. As a Kurdish soldier would tell me later— this conflict has been churning for centuries, but remains hidden from most of our views.